


Mesopotamia

by Ytterbium



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, and enjoy crowley on his knees, basically i'm in love with amanda tapping, pre king of hell era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-28
Updated: 2016-05-28
Packaged: 2018-07-10 17:34:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6998032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ytterbium/pseuds/Ytterbium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>‘Do I look like I have any use for a thing like you’, Naomi says and steps closer, crowds him against the wall – and then there’s lightening and thunder exploding beside his head and he can see her wings like shadows and they fill the entire room and the rooms beyond, perhaps the whole palace. It’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen – it will follow him into his dreams. ‘Demons don’t sleep’, Naomi says and he didn’t even feel her entering his brain. ‘But I take your compliment nevertheless.’</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mesopotamia

**Author's Note:**

> Submission for Bri's Mayhem Writing Challenge on Tumblr.  
> Prompt: You know, it's okay to cry.

The almost black sunlight licks at the ground - at the the ochreous sand hills, the riverbanks of Euphrat and Tigris, at fern woods, craters and brittle stones.  
Naked children play games of marbles between bordeaux-red cabins. A woman with yellow hair is standing in her pyramidal temple, more fort than palace, she’s looking outside where the sun goes down and parents call their children in for the night and long haired dogs are searching the road for spiders.  
Crowley knows this before he rips reality apart and this world starts tugging at his skin like they did back in hell to flay him whole. And then he’s on the floor vomiting gastric juice and blood.  
The woman turns to look at him, except she isn’t a woman at all. She’s a thing of too many eyes and teeth and wings and a light that’s buzzing inside an empty skull. ‘Where did you come from?’, she asks him, mildly intrigued.  
‘Timetravel’, he says as he’s able to speak and spits pieces of his stomach lining on the floor. ‘Sorry about your floor. You’re an Angel, right?’, he asks and manages to sit up. He eyes up at her and smiles, his teeth red with blood. ‘Love your palace.’ The angel’s clearly not impressed, humourless creature she is, and he finds himself asking how it can be that they’re ancient and eternal and yet know nothing of being alive at all. ‘It’s called a zikkurat’, she says like he that’s something he should already know. ‘Right. When and where are we?’ ‘Mesopotamia. And human calculations of time have no meaning for us.’ ‘A bit more specific than that?’ He doesn’t really expect her to respond but for some reason she does.  
‘In five days the tower of Babel will fall.’ She looks down at him like she can see past his eyes and into his skull. ‘You’re a demon’, she says and suddenly there is so much power radiating off her skin he almost blacks out. ‘Demons can’t travel through time. It is a privilege of the angels. How did you get here?’  
She hasn’t moved but her threat is a living thing, curling around his head like a snake. ‘One demon can. Lilith.’ The name tastes of ashes when he spits it out. Of promises and promises and all the things that burn. ‘I imagine it’s what she does for fun.’ When he gets no response but the humming sound of static electricity around his head, he elaborates. ‘It’s what they do to the faulty ones. Timetravel - let’s say it’s not all that pleasant for us demons. So they don’t like you, they send you back in time and if you make it back to your time, maybe you get to join the gang after all. Are you going to kill me now?’  
‘Why should I kill you?’ She asks like the thought honestly didn’t occur to her until now and the humming sound disappears. ‘Demon here? Isn’t that what you people do?’ She smiles superiorly at that. ‘I’m not a soldier. I am a queen. I don’t kill demons, I have others who do that for me.’  
‘In that case. Fancy a drink?’ He’s managed to get up by now and when he stands they’re about the same height. He’s wearing a girl, he realizes when he looks down at himself, but he doesn’t know what her face looks like and how he possessed her. He can’t remember much of what’s happened since the pain ended, since Lilith and there’s something wrong with this one. It’s been three days since they took him off the rack.  
‘You want to drink with me?’ Now she sounds genuinely amused.  
‘Sure. You seem lovely. What do they call you?’  
‘Naomi’, she says. ‘And you- they call you Crowley. But that’s not your name.’  
She’s moving towards him now, closer and closer until she’s just inches in front of his face,  
occupying his personal space with an entitlement that’s intimidating and maybe a little bit hot- just a little. But, well, it’s been ages since he wasn’t imprisoned by pain, since his thoughts weren’t absorbed by the need to make it stop, and she’s the first thing that so far hasn’t tried to hurt him since the hellhounds came to claim his soul, so he may not be all that objective in the matter. ‘Talk’, she says. ‘You’re right, love. It’s Fergus McLeoud’, he says, and Naomi looks at him, tilts her head and looks some more. Bloody angels. ‘The demons’, he starts and stops. ‘The demons’, he tries again. ‘Back in the torturing chambers of hell used to say they didn’t remember who they’d been as humans and that I wouldn’t either once they were done. But I remember all of it. Every day of my short, sad, human life.’ ‘So that’s why they sent you here’, Naomi says, almost kind. ‘They can’t bear to look at you. There are stories, you know. About some demons who never truly turn, whose humanity can’t be burnt out by the devouring flames of hell. You should be grateful.’  
‘Because it means there’s still hope?’, he asks wryly, but angels don’t get irony. ‘You’re a demon. Look into the mirror, your eyes are black. There is no hope for you. But it means that I take pity.’ She waves a hand and he’s holding a glass filled with purple liquor. He downs it at once, it tastes of vinegar and old yeast but he’s never needed a drink more than now and Naomi refills his glass without a word. She’s not drinking herself and she’s not saying anything, she’s just standing there, watching. ‘You know it’s okay to cry’, she tells him somewhere along the line where he’s still trying to drink himself into oblivion and Crowley realizes that she’s right, he’s crying, maybe has been all along. ‘Demons don’t cry’, she adds. ‘Like angels, they don’t feel.’ ‘But unlike angels, we remember how it was to feel’, he says, and that’s something she hasn’t thought of. ‘That’s why you’re going to loose’, he adds. ‘In my time. When Lucifer rises, and the apocalypse comes. You don’t know a thing about humans, but we do. We know about their child pornography and their whores, about their sad little wishes and their twisted hears. And that’s how we win.’  
Naomi bloody laughs. ‘You win?’, she says. ‘There is- there is no winning for you! How well do you know Lucifer?’, but of course she already knows the answer to that.‘Lucifer is not one of you. He is an angel. An archangel. The morning star. He is our brother. He may be your god, but to him you are abominations. Cockroaches crawling the face of the earth, and he will crush you all once he has no more use for you. What do you think will he do to you when he annihilated human kind?’  
Crowley eyes at her, half suspicious, half in disbelief. ‘Whatever’, he says because he doesn’t feel like answering her just now. ‘So what exactly is it that you are doing here? When you’re a queen and all. Shouldn’t you be upstairs, reigning?’  
‘Once the tower falls it will be no longer permitted to walk among humans. The angels will return to heaven and we won’t walk the earth for another two thousand years.’  
‘So?’  
‘There are a few of us who have become too accustomed to Earth and its pleasures. I am here to convince them to come back home.’ ‘Sounds fun. How do you convince an angel who’s been here for thousands of years he should go back upstairs? Where there’s no food, no fun, no sex?’  
‘I have my ways’, Naomi says and it’s indifferent and threatening and he finds himself drawn to it like a moth to the stars - he could eat her or drink her or swallow her whole. ‘I could be of use to you’, Crowley offers, and Naomi laughs at him.  
‘Do I look like I have any use for a thing like you’, she says and steps closer, crowds him against the wall – and then there’s lightening and thunder exploding beside his head and he can see her wings like shadows and they fill the entire room and the rooms beyond, perhaps the whole palace. It’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen – it will follow him into his dreams. ‘Demons don’t sleep’, Naomi says and he didn’t even feel her entering his brain. ‘But I take your compliment nevertheless.’ She raises a hand to brush over his lower lip, pushes her thumb into his mouth, but when he starts sucking at it she shoves him backwards and he hits the wall.  
‘You reek of sulfur and chaos and pain’, she says as if to convince herself. ‘This stops here.’  
‘It doesn’t need to.’  
‘It does. I can see your true face writhing behind your stolen bones and it repels me.’  
‘Then close your eyes, love’, he says. But before he can reach for her, before he can do anything at all Naomi takes his face into her hand and suddenly he’s unable to move.  
‘You do realize that I know what it is you are trying to do’, Naomi says, now mildly amused. ‘It won’t work.’  
‘And what is that?’  
‘You are trying to seduce me because you know you can’t win in a fight. You intend to kill me and use my grace to go back to your time. Like I said: it won’t work.’  
‘Can’t blame me for trying.’  
‘I can give you what you try to take’, she says and touches his hair, fists a hand into it and pulls until she draws blood, ‘but you owe me for this.’ And then there’s darkness and a suffocating pain in his ribcage where his soul used to be and he feels like something within him tries to rip him apart – and then he lands on his knees, again, on a floor of stone.  
The world around him is saturated with the smell of sulfur and blood, he manages to look up and realizes he’s kneeling in front of a girl on a throne.  
Lilith smiles like she just retrieved her very favorite toy and Crowley thinks he’s never hated anyone the way he hates her - he could kill her right there and then. He doesn’t. He bows his head and says, ‘my queen.’


End file.
